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With a voice like scorched earth and a guitar played as though its strings were ablaze, Benjamin Booker has taken the blues straight to hell. His songs, mini-dramas of sun-bleached rock, trade on the old-time traditions of players like Son House, Lowell Fulson, and Brownie McGhee. Booker’s approach is to push the perimeters of the blues to its most uncomfortable and perilous extremes, affording his music the cautious air of danger. His self-titled debut, released in 2014 on Rough Trade records, is a revelation of pantheon dimensions, a temple of ancestral and present influences which has carried Booker’s collection of work to esteemed heights.

While everyone knows that their iconic 2003 hair-pop confection “I Believe in a Thing Called Love” will outlive most millennials, that overindulgent sophomore disc One Way Ticket to Hell… and Back sank most chances of the group rising above One Hit Wonder status. Frustrated, the group ventured off into other bands, with high-pitched vocalist Justin Hawkins trying his hand with the group Hot Leg, while guitarist Dan Hawkins and bassist Richie Edwards formed Stone Gods, both outfits releasing albums within a year of each other. Yet fate had other plans in store, and in 2012, the band released a long-awaited third disc, Hot Cakes, which contains what is arguably the greatest song they have ever done, “Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us”.

With solid sales and a fanbase that never really left them, the band made their way out Valentia Island to record the aptly-titled Last of Our Kind, a disc which spends its time talking about barbarians and ancient conquests while still delivering the roaring riff rockers that have become their signature. As if that wasn’t enough, the group even crowdsourced some group vocals on the soaring title track to their fans, known as The Darkness Army, who were more than happy to comply.

To celebrate the disc’s release, Dan Hawkins took on PopMatters’ 20 Questions and revealed to us a love of Watership Down, Yves Saint Laurent, and why he’d want to take a peek at what’s going on in the year 3000.

Primrose Green is one hell of an insular folk album. It’s a disc less focused on satisfying the writer’s ego or existing purely on the basis of heartfelt confessionals as so many modern “folk” albums are; instead, it focuses on establishing its own universe, one where psychedelic textures mix in with delicately finger-picked guitars, creating something sonically unique but also entirely self-contained. Primrose Green is a universe unto itself, and it’s for that reason that so many people are talking about its creator, Ryley Walker.

The impossible has happened: Cannibal Ox have released a second album.

Some are not too surprised by this development, given that the duo consisting of Vast Aire and Vordul Mega dropped a short EP in 2013 after over a decade of inactivity. At the start of that decade, 2001 specifically, a little album called The Cold Vein was released, produced by Company Flow’s El-P and the flagship full-length for his new record label Definitive Jux. With Vordul and Vast’s poetic, dense lyrics given a dark, brooding atmosphere in the form of El-P’s beats, the album quickly became a stone-cold classic, immediately putting the label on the map, setting the guys up for success, and redefining the very possibilities of what indie rap could do at a time when more indie-centric press was finally coming into prominence.

By the end of this introduction, you will own two Richard Jankovich albums.

Jankovich has been one of the most fascinating under-the-radar artists to emerge in the last 15 years. Back in 2003, he worked with a variety of collaborators under the name the Burnside Project. Their most notable album, 2003’s The Networks, the Circuits, the Streams, the Harmonies, was a small bit of electro-pop wonder, mixing pop culture-heavy lyrics with dynamic digital arrangements with an astute sense of melody. Who loved the Burnside Project? The UK charts did. Queer as Folk did, using single “Que the Pulse to Begin” as its theme song in later years. Hell, even Cameron Crowe did, nominating it for that year’s Shortlist Music Prize. There was a profound warmth to Jankovich’s music, which helped separate it from a lot of the other electronic acts at the time.